The Best Laptops for Video and Photo Editing Updated November 28, 2018 After a new round of testing, our new Windows pick is the Microsoft Surface Book 2 (15-inch), and if you need a Mac, we recommend the Apple MacBook Pro (15-inch, 2018).
Tom Brant The Best Laptops for Video Editing in 2019 Whether you're a film student or a video pro, you don't need a studio to make a rough cut in the field. These top laptop picks can breeze through demanding video-editing tasks. Here's how to judge just what you need: CPU choices, storage basics, screen traits, and more fine details.
The Right Specs for Editing Power Powerful weighing just a few pounds can now handle many of the tasks that editors used to perform on intricate and expensive equipment in a studio. So whether your boss expects you to make first edits in the field, you're a film student, or you just want to review your vacation footage on your flight home, you should consider a laptop with robust enough specs for video editing. Here's what to look for. Companies seldom make laptops specifically for video editing in the same way they push bulked-up machines for PC gamers, or targeted at students. That means you'll have to pick and choose features from among standard laptop categories such as, gaming laptops,. Your list of most-wanted features could end up belonging to a dream machine that doesn't exactly match any laptop currently for sale. But at least you'll have a starting point from which to make compromises.
Devoting most of your budget to a, a buffed-up, and many gigabytes of memory is a safe bet, but ancillary features such as, input/output options, and the operating system are far more important factors for you than they are for the average laptop shopper. So is weight, since even a few extra pounds could push your already heavy bag over an airline's weight limit or make your carry-on too fat to fit into an overhead bin.
Display specs are especially important, especially if you plan on using your laptop for more advanced editing tasks such as shading and color correction. A comfortable keyboard is a must, too, since keyboard shortcuts help streamline many editing tasks, from starting and stopping playback to adding keyframes. Finally, there are a few features common on laptops that you don't need to worry about when buying a mobile video-editing station. Chief among them is battery life, since video editing consumes so much power that your laptop will probably spend most of its time plugged in. (If editing on the road is a must, buy a power strip and spare adapter for hotel rooms, and make sure your flight has in-seat power outlets before you buy a ticket.) Neither will you get much use out of a touch screen or a that doubles as a tablet, unless you're looking for a machine that you'll also use for web browsing and watching videos after the end of a long day of shooting and editing.
The Key Engines of Editing: CPU and Memory. The two most important laptop components for video editors are the CPU and memory. Most applications are optimized to take advantage of modern multi-core CPUs, which usually means that the more cores you have, the better. Fortunately, even some of Intel's mobile Core U-series processors, designed to use less power than their desktop counterparts, now have four cores, and with the 8th Generation 'Coffee Lake' mobile processors, a few of the Core i7 and Core i9 H-series CPUs (which lie between the U series and Intel's desktop chips) feature Hyper-Threading-enabled designs with support for six cores and 12 concurrent processing threads.
For a bird's-eye view of how a higher processor core count increases performance, you'll want to check out how well the laptop you're considering fares on our Cinebench benchmark, which is listed in the performance section of each review. This test uses software from video-effects titan Maxon to spit out a proprietary score based on how quickly the PC can render a 3D image. Although multiple factors can influence the score, in general, the more (and faster) cores the CPU has and the more addressable threads it supports, the quicker the image renders.
The principle is the same for such as and, which are engineered to distribute compute tasks over multiple cores just like Cinebench. Any Cinebench result above 700 is excellent for a laptop, and suggests that it will be an adequate video-editing machine. Typical machines with these results range from some Core i7-powered ultraportables to most mobile workstations equipped with Xeon processors. Note, however, that desktops with full-powered CPUs can push far above 1,000 on this test. The problem with selecting a many-core processor is that manufacturers don't always list core counts and support for Hyper-Threading (or the lack thereof) on the box or website product page.
You may have to determine the exact CPU inside and Google for details; is a primary source for this info. Luckily, finding out how much memory the system has is much easier.
A good rule of thumb is that you should select a laptop with 16GB of RAM. For many consumer ultraportables, this is the limit, although you can now order some mobile workstations and Apple's MacBook Pros with 32GB. The cost is often prohibitive, however, and we think the money is better spent on a faster CPU, so we're calling 16GB the sweet spot. Hard Drive or SSD: Keep It a Spin-Free Zone? To complete the trifecta of principal specs, you'll want a fast boot drive.
In nearly all cases, this means configuring a laptop with a solid-state drive (SSD), which can access data much faster than older spinning drives. For everyday computing use, the speed difference between an SSD and a spinning-platter hard drive is vast, since an SSD's main skill is decreasing boot times and making apps load faster. These things don't matter as much for video editing, but an SSD will still offer noticeable speed gains on specialized tasks such as playing back multiple clips at once or working with 4K footage. Ideally, you want a capacious hard drive in addition to a speedy SSD, but since the cost of built-in SSDs skyrockets at capacities above 1TB, it's more cost effective to make sure your laptop has a Thunderbolt 3 connection to enable a link to a fast where you'll store most of your footage. That said, some larger workstation and gaming machines can offer two drives (an SSD boot drive, plus a roomy hard drive), and if you're in the market for a big machine, this is an ideal video editors' arrangement: both speed and mass storage at your disposal, without external-drive hassles.
When it comes to assessing SSDs, midrange and high-end machines have moved toward SSDs using the PCI Express bus (often associated with the term 'NVMe,' for a protocol that affords faster data transfers than ever). PCI Express SSDs are often implemented these days on laptops via the M.2 interface, which reduces the drive itself to a gumstick-size sliver.
That said, in some designs, such as Apple's MacBook Pros, the SSD may be soldered down and not upgradable after purchase. (See our advice for the and much more about the.) Graphics Acceleration: Dedicated or Not? Most non-gaming laptops come with graphics-acceleration silicon that's part of the CPU, usually dubbed 'Intel HD Graphics' or 'UHD Graphics,' not a separate graphics processing unit (GPU). This arrangement offers weak performance if you're playing richly detailed, AAA-grade, but it's actually fine for many video-editing scenarios.
As mentioned earlier, nearly all video-editing suites are designed to take advantage of more powerful processors, but the ability to leverage powerful graphics-processing hardware isn't as common. There are a few exceptions. For example, a discrete GPU can speed up the video-encoding process in, and the latest version of Blackmagic's Davinci Resolve editing suite has a new video-playback engine that's optimized for powerful GPUs. In fact, Davinci's Linux version offers support for as many as eight individual GPUs. Since the highest number of graphics processors we've ever seen in a laptop is two (and that's quite rare, seen only on elite, gigantic gaming rigs that tend to exceed $5,000), it's best to save GPU-accelerated editing tasks for when you get back to the studio.
That said, if the laptop you're considering offers an entry-level discrete GPU for a reasonable premium (say, $200 or so), there's little reason not to spring for it and enjoy the added speed boost when you're exporting video. This will usually be, if it's a mainstream, non-gaming-oriented machine, an Nvidia GeForce MX130 or MX150 graphics chip. Once you've graduated to a GeForce GTX graphics chip (the lowest-end, 'starter' chip there is the GeForce GTX 1050) you've graduated to the gaming-chip leagues; an Nvidia Quadro or AMD Radeon Pro chip means you're looking at a workstation-garde laptop. You can get a comparative idea of a laptop's graphics performance by glancing at its scores on our 3DMark benchmark tests, as well as our game-simulating graphics trials from Unigine. Connectivity: Lose the Weight, Not the Ports If you're already carrying around dozens of pounds of camera and lighting equipment, the last thing you want is to add weight to your bag.
Luckily, many very powerful laptops weigh less than 3 pounds these days. The thinnest and lightest won't have discrete GPUs or displays larger than 14 inches, but you may be able to do without these features, especially if you've got a studio with a more powerful editing station where you do most of your cutting. If you're slimming down, however, try not to lose too many ports.
We recommend at least one port, which lets you connect to external displays via the DisplayPort standard, lightning-fast external drives, and pretty much any USB peripheral, such as external or, via an adapter. Some laptops, including all MacBook Pro models, only include Thunderbolt 3, which is a bit extreme since the standard is still relatively new. The sweet spot is one or two Thunderbolt 3 ports, and one or two regular USB 3.0 or USB 3.1 ports. An SD card slot can also be useful for transferring footage directly from your camera to your laptop, and all laptops should have an audio port for connecting headphones to use while editing on the plane or in a cafe.
Assessing the Display: Counting Inches With many laptops these days offering at least full HD (1,920-by-1,080-pixel) resolution, your main screen consideration should be screen size, not pixel count. A 15-inch or 17-inch display will let you see more of your project timeline, but it comes at the expense of weight and heft. Meanwhile, a 12-inch display like the one on the could have you squinting. The sweet spot, therefore, if you need to travel with your editing machine is 13 or 14 inches.
Many laptops, including lineup, manage to squeeze a 13-inch or 14-inch screen into a chassis that otherwise would hold a smaller display by slimming down the bezel, or border, around the screen. While full HD resolution is fine for many editing tasks, if you shoot primarily in 4K, you will want a screen resolution to match.
Combine a 4K (that is, 3,840-by-2,160-pixel) screen, a four- or six-core processor, and a discrete GPU, though, and you'll likely end up with brutally short battery life. So, if you settle on a 4K screen, make sure it's feasible that you'll stick near a power outlet most of the time, and consider buying an external battery charger to use in a pinch. At the other end of the spectrum, don't choose a resolution below full HD in any video-editing machine. If your video-editing tasks mostly involve arranging clips, mixing audio, and the like, you probably don't need to worry about the display's color capabilities. For more artistic or precision-minded jobs, though, such as shading and color correction, you'll want to pay attention to how many colors the screen can display and how it calibrates the color profile. Look for specs like a P3 color gamut and automatic calibration, features that are often rolled into a single marketing moniker such as HP's DreamColor.
As mentioned earlier, you probably needn't worry about whether or not the laptop has a touch screen. Video editing involves precision and repetition, which are best suited to keyboard shortcuts and a mouse, not touch inputs. The one exception is the, a narrow, secondary touch screen perched forward of the keyboard, between it and the screen. It's designed with apps like Final Cut Pro and the Adobe Creative Suite in mind, and will pop up context-relevant shortcuts with supported software. It's essentially a function row for serious content creators that morphs according to the program in use. If you're a novice editor or a veteran willing to switch up your workflow, the Touch Bar could be a useful way to scrub through clips, adjust audio levels, and perform other similar tasks.
If you're buying a high-end MacBook Pro, the Touch Bar comes with the laptop, whether you want it or not, so you might as well experiment with it. But we don't recommend choosing an Apple laptop solely for this still-novel interface. Editing Platform Basics: Mac or PC? Video editors are among the class of creative professionals that stereotypically prefer to use Macs instead of PCs. Whether or not you fit that stereotype, if you're a veteran of the industry, you probably already have a preference, so we're not going to try to change your mind. If you're OS-agnostic, however, you have a vast array of hardware choices if you decide to choose a PC over a Mac laptop. The biggest advantage of going with or Linux is the possibility of buying a workstation-class laptop with a many-core Intel Xeon processor, something not available on any Mac portable; the closest thing is a six-core Core i7 or i9 on.
We tested a kitted-out Core i9 version of the 2018 MacBook Pro and found it a brute for video-editing heavy lifts, but you're looking at a minimum starting price of $2,799 for the i9 silicon, exclusive of any other upgrades. Another OS consideration is video-editing software. Final Cut Pro only works on Macs, although most other editing suites, from Premiere Pro to Avid Media Composer, are available on multiple platforms. If you're wedded to one program or another (and most serious video editors are), we'd expect that to play into your decision just as much, if not more, than the OS itself or the hardware available. Ready for Our Recommendations?
Okay: Enough geeking out over specs. It's time to tally up how much mobile video editing is going to cost you. Let's start with MacBooks, since they have the narrowest range of models available. On the low end, you can buy a dual-core Core i5 13-inch MacBook Pro with a 512GB SSD and 16GB of RAM for about $1,900. A maxed-out 15-inch model, on the other hand, with a six-core Core i9 processor, 32GB of RAM, and a 4TB SSD, rings up at a whopping $6,700. (That said, settling for 2TB of SSD storage would knock off $2,000.) The price range for Windows laptops is not terribly different, even as the selection is much wider. You can find a 13-inch, quad-core PC with 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD for less than $2,000, while a 17-inch gaming rig with a high-end GPU or a workstation with a Xeon processor can easily top $5,000 if you add all the trimmings.
We've selected 10 of our top-rated models whose specs and prices fall within this rough range and outlined them below. Some are gaming laptops, others are mobile workstations, and there are even a few thin-and-light models.
Any of them should be powerful enough for at least casual video editing, and some are muscled-up enough for major editing tasks. Ultimately, how much you'll have to budget depends on whether you're only using your video-editing laptop for quick work in the field, or whether you plan to bring it back to the studio, plug it in, and use it as your primary machine. If you're going the former route, you'll also want to take a look at our when it comes time to upgrade your main rig. If you're choosing the latter, you might want to familiarize yourself with our list of, one of which may offer the power—especially the heftier CPU—you need for marathon editing sessions on deadline night.
Pros: Top-end gaming performance. Slick chassis with sharp lighting. Oodles of storage and ports.
1440p G-Sync display. Configurable, with less expensive models a strong value. Cons: As-tested configuration is expensive. Tobii eye tracking adds to cost, but doesn't add much functionality. Bottom Line: The Alienware 17 R5 gaming laptop delivers serious power in a big, but nicely built, package. The model we reviewed is expensive, but the configuration choices offer well-priced options for different budgets.
Pros: Premium alloy construction. Elegant convertible design. Sharp high-resolution touch display in new larger size. Discrete Nvidia GTX 1060 graphics. Very long battery life.
Multiple configuration options. Xbox wireless controller receiver is integrated. Cons: 16GB RAM maximum. Surface Pen is an additional purchase. Adding SSD storage is pricey. Some finicky issues required troubleshooting in our tests. Bottom Line: The Surface Book 2 is a feat of design, a top-of-the-line premium convertible 2-in-1 laptop that's fast, long lasting, versatile, and portable.
It's even up for gaming.